In the Balance

Jacob Van LunenWednesday, August 19, 2009

ello, and welcome to another edition of Building on a Budget. This week I have a new and exciting Extended deck to share with you. The initial idea was sent to me via email by a reader named Trevor. The deck uses one of the most powerful tools in Extended, cascade. People are a bit wary of the decks that cascade into one of the big suspend spells. I mentioned the use of Hypergenesis, the suspend Eureka, a few months ago. People have been struggling quite a bit to mold a deck list around that concept. All those lists seem very powerful, but most of them struggle to win through a single Counterspell.

Trevor decided that Restore Balance might be a better spell to cascade into than Hypergenesis. I tried out the deck, and while I can't quite say that it's more powerful than the Hygenesis deck, it certainly feels like you're playing a more interactive game. Here's the initial decklist that Trevor sent me:

The initial decklist looks pretty good. I took it for a test drive on Magic Online and won a pretty good portion of the games I played. There were a few things that didn't work out so well, though.

The mana wasn't very good. I lost a few games where I just watched in horror as my opponent had a quick start and I just couldn't find the right lands to play a cascade spell to inflict my one-sided Obliterate. I wanted to change the mana base before I went any further.

I did a quick search on Gatherer and looked up artifacts that costs three mana to cast and produce any color of mana. My initial instinct was to add some Prismatic Lens, but that would ruin my 100% chance of cascading into Restore Balance.

I played a few more matches with the deck and started seeing better results. Unfortunately, there were still a few things that weren't going very well for me.

I found myself losing games even after I destroyed four lands and two creatures with Restore Balance. I just couldn't find win conditions, or my win conditions would find their way into the exile zone via Path to Exile. I wanted to change the way the deck won games. As it stood, Phyrexian Totem and Salvage Titan were the only routes to victory. I didn't like the Salvage Titan because it weakened my Restore Balance and didn't put enough of a presence on the board. I looked over the some lists of legal Extended cards and found March of the Machines.

There wasn't any reason to stick with Swamps as the basic land of choice now that I had cut the Null Profusion and Salvage Titan. I decided to cut some Swamps for other basics and smooth out the mana a bit more.

I really liked the Phyrexian Totems, and decided I wanted more cards that fell into that category. I decided to include a Foriysian Totem and see how it worked out in the main.

My last mission was finding room for a playset of Demonic Dread. I don't think I was ever upset to have a cascade spell in hand. Playing twelve of my best card as opposed to eight seemed like a huge boon.

The deck is pretty incredible in Game 1 against just about every other deck. In Games 2 and 3 I usually found myself struggling to deal with Ancient Grudge. Fortunately for this deck, the Onslaught fetchlands are rotating out of Extended soon, which should make it harder to splash cards like Ancient Grudge and Kataki, War's Wage.

The deck doesn't use any cards that are rotating out of Extended this season. My past few columns have been about Standard decks that include a good number of cards from Lorwyn block. I've received a lot of emails from people who ask if I can try to minimize the amount of cards I use that are rotating. This is most certainly in the spirit of Building on a Budget, and I decided that it's probably a good idea to focus on concepts that will still exist once autumn rolls around.

I didn't make a sideboard because there is virtually no data regarding the new Extended metagame. I could just make a list of generic sideboard cards, but that would be inaccurate and I probably wouldn't side any of them in.

I understand that these results are skewed, and in full three-game matches the deck probably would not have performed as well. The deck has a huge weakness to Ancient Grudge, but hopefully that won't be as large a factor once Onslaught block rotates out. I probably stole the game from the blue deck because he didn't expect something like Restore Balance.

I really like this as a casual deck for the new Extended. It does something incredibly powerful with brutal consistency. Its major weakness is that it can't really do anything impressive until turn three or four. Usually, you just want to wait until turn four so you can full-on Armageddon your opponent along with the Wrath of God. Perhaps there is another deck list lying underneath all this; I feel like this is a powerful enough concept that there should almost certainly be a better way of fitting the puzzle pieces together.

After playing some games with the new list I was exceptionally impressed with the power level of March of the Machines. If I played enough matches with the deck I'm sure there would be a good number of games that I won by simply casting the March and attacking. It seems like the perfect finisher for our deck and should probably push out the Foriysian Totem that took the 60th slot.

If I were to sleeve up the deck tonight and play some games with my friends the list would probably look like this:

One of the coolest parts about this deck is that if I were to make a non-budget version it would look virtually identical to the list you see here.

I hope everyone enjoyed our first steps out into the unknown wilderness of the new Extended. There are tons of deck ideas that need to be explored. I expect a lot of new technology to come out with Mind's Desire, Wirewood Symbiote, cycling lands, Riptide Laboratory, and Chain of Vapor all on the chopping block come September.

Thanks to everyone who sends me emails and writes in the forums. I'd like to hear from you this week. (The Wizards forums are in the shop right now, but you can still email me, below.) If there's a big enough response to this archetype I may work on this deck some more next week.